Brahma Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney is an Indian journalist and strategic analyst, born on 18 January 1962 in New Delhi. In June 1984 he was the Associated Press correspondent for South Asia and, according to SikhNet's account, the only foreign reporter who managed to stay on in Amritsar during Operation Blue Star, the army attack on Sri Harmandir Sahib and the Sri Akal Takht Sahib complex. Complete media censorship had been imposed and the press gagged.

Key moments

• June 1984: his dispatches are described as the first non-governmental reports on the operation. By SikhNet's account they ran on the front pages of the New York Times, The Times of London and The Guardian, and gave much higher casualty figures than the government's.
• He reported in The Times of London that soldiers tied up Sikhs and shot them at close range, according to the human rights group Ensaaf.
• The government charged him with sedition, promoting enmity between religious groups, and deliberate insult to religious feelings.
• Early November 1984: Delhi High Court Justice D.R. Khanna cancelled his bail, calling the report "a recklessly distorted and highly inflammatory version of the Punjab episode".
• September 1985: after journalists' associations protested, the government dropped the prosecution and returned his passport (Ensaaf).
• 1985: he received a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club of New York. The source does not say what it was for.

For comparison, the government's White Paper put the dead at 83 Army personnel and 493 others, while the eyewitness figures Ensaaf cites run from 4,000 to 8,000.

He later became a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, an adviser to India's National Security Council until January 2000, and the author of nine books, including Asian Juggernaut and Water: Asia's New Battleground. Wikipedia lists him as a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, and the Academy says he writes columns for outlets such as Project Syndicate.

In Sikh and human rights writing he is cited as the reporter whose dispatches were among the first independent accounts of Blue Star, and who faced the sedition law for them.